Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“The Trump-appointed judge found that the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act “exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms.””
https://reason.com/2025/05/01/federal-judge-rules-trumps-alien-enemies-act-proclamation-is-unlawful/
“Newly uncovered guidance from the Justice Department claims the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) allows federal law enforcement officers to enter the houses of suspected gang members without a warrant and remove them from the country without any judicial review.”
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“The Trump administration has refused to disclose many of the operational details of its unprecedented invocation of the 1798 wartime law to send alleged TDA members to a prison in El Salvador under an agreement with that country’s president, Nayib Bukele. The memo is one of the first public glimpses at the Trump administration’s claims that it can identify, pursue, arrest, and deport migrants, unconstrained by the Fourth Amendment or due process.”
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“”The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” Wilkinson warned. “Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done.””
https://reason.com/2025/04/25/justice-department-memo-claims-alien-enemies-act-allows-warrantless-home-searches-and-no-judicial-review/
“The Trump administration has, for the fourth time in history, invoked the war-time Alien Enemies Act of 1798, even though our nation is not at war—and its last use remains one of the most shameful episodes in American history.
That involved President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 in 1942. It was the basis for the internment of around 112,000 people of Japanese descent, 70,000 of whom were American citizens.”
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“For years, we’ve endured constitutional conservatives’ bloviating about the importance of protecting the sacred principles enshrined in our Constitution. Those include the separation of powers—legislative, executive and judicial checks on one another—and due process. Many of these hypocrites are defending the administration’s policies and bashing a judge for halting the hasty airlift of accused criminal aliens to a prison run by a banana-republic strongman—a directive the president promptly ignored.
Perhaps most of these deportees are criminals and a threat (unlike peaceful Japanese residents who posed no threat whatsoever). They still deserve due process—their day in court, so to speak—to prove they have indeed violated the law. Constitutional conservatives of all people should understand that the government gets things wrong and individuals deserve protection from arbitrary actions by its agents.
We’ve already seen examples of immigrants who were deported based on the government allegedly mistaking a soccer tattoo for gang insignia. Let’s say you were walking around and, based on your attire or ethnic background, the police suspected you were a gang-banger and took you to jail. Wouldn’t your first call be to your lawyer? Don’t you deserve due process to prove you were a passerby before being shipped to Pelican Bay? (And non-citizens generally are considered persons under the Constitution—and also deserve due process.)
The administration isn’t just ignoring these constitutional due-process protections but seems to be actively mocking them. “What were all these young women that were killed and raped by members of (Tren de Aragua)—what was their due process?”” asked Tom Homan, director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Murder and rape always are horrific, but everyone still gets a trial to, you know, prove they actually committed the crime.”
https://reason.com/2025/04/04/the-alien-enemies-act-is-an-unconstitutional-affront-to-civil-liberties/